In “The Figure in the Carpet,” one of Henry James's late tales, three young worshipful readers of a particular author get deeply – one might say obsessively – involved in finding the basic underlying message or purpose that unifies all his novels and that he tantalizingly insists lies there quite obviously, waiting to be discovered. The story's narrator likens the object of their search to “a complex figure in a Persian carpet.” He never finds it. His two friends supposedly learn the secret but die without divulging it to anyone else.

So much for the story. It is the image itself that intrigues me, “the figure in the carpet,” more particularly a variation of the image used by James's biographer, Leon Edel, in a brief essay on the art of writing biography: “The Figure under the Carpet.” The biographer, says Edel, must be concerned with both “figures.” The figure in the carpet is traced in matters of record, in archival materials that often threaten to sink the project by their sheer volume. Coping somehow with the clutter of materials, the biographer goes to work like a portrait painter, “who reads only the lines in the face, the settled mouth, the color of the cheeks, the brush strokes and pencil marks of time. More often than not this offers us the revealing mask of life. The biographer must learn to know the mask – and in doing this he will have won half the battle.”